The Albanese government may be adept at negotiating with insiders, but its failure to explain decisions and engage voters is deepening public distrust.

It’s about time that the government stopped telling citizens that it feels and understands their pain. Like all originally empathetic statements that had some meaning when original and sincere, it has become a cliché, and most voters don’t believe it anyway. They don’t believe that the government knows what is happening in Australian households and they don’t think it cares much, except potentially later at the ballot box. Not many of the inner circle are doing it tough. Nor do they believe that the government knows what is happening with the economy, with inflation, and with the cost of living. It is by no means evident that the government is acting in accordance with a plan. Or that it is focused on minimising the pain or evenly distributing the pain people are experiencing.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that most voters support a particular alternative economy strategy – even less the one that the opposition is preaching. But there’s a deep unease about the doldrums into which the economy seems to have fallen and the lack of an obvious pathway out. And about the lack of discussion about what to do.

The treasurer, Jim Chalmers, gives a competent daily commentary on the statistics of the day. But they do not inspire listeners with the idea that he is anything but an observer of events over which he has little control. Nor does he, or any other government spokesman (from the prime minister down) spend time explaining to the community just how and why the government expects that circumstances will improve, interest rates will fall, inflation will ease, and that the economy is preparing for a transition to one offering higher economic growth, better wages and an improved standard of living and higher economic security.

Of course, anything that includes the word ‘productivity’ is not cutting through to voters. There are ways of describing attempts to improve economic efficiency. But ones that blame workers for not working hard enough, or which hold that jobs in health care, childcare, aged care or community services cannot have outputs measured and thus do not count are not a way of mobilising community support. Even less so when most of those given to using the word show little interest in training and retraining, in investment and reinvestment or in providing the sort of community and society in which people share in the rewards of greater production. Perhaps the missing extra wealth is in the pockets of the new billionaires, the financial sector and the big consultancy firms.

Big, bold presentations from the billionaire lobbies are treated with suspicion.

Voters are interested in ideas for change in the economy, in new types of production and new ways of generating wealth. But a thicket of clichés about data centres, whether coming from spivs or........

© Pearls and Irritations